Black and white tattoo design of an ornate cross with filigree scrollwork and engraved-style hatching.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate filigree cross design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A cross with flared, pointed arms is filled with dense scrollwork, spirals and a diamond-shaped centre panel. The linework uses bold outlines with fine hatched engraving across the arms and shading that gives the cross depth. The design is shown in solid black and white on a plain background with no colour.

Blackwork Cross Filigree Scrollwork Ornament Diamond Spiral

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, the fire's only good for one more story. You want the Mason's Cross, the one that hung above the water gate at Harrowmere until the river took the gate and the cross went down with it. Old Tobias Quill carved it the winter his wife died, so mind what you hear in it.

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He cut the arms flared like the ends of a spade, then filled every inch with scroll and spiral, because he said grief had no empty places and neither should a cross. The centre he left as a diamond, pierced so fine a candle could be seen through it. Lord Ralf Brannock paid him in silver and asked why the thing needed so much hatching. Tobias said the lines were for the rain to catch in.

When the floods came in the spring of the great frost, the water rose over the gate, the cross tore loose and sank into the moat mud. Nobody would go down for it. Then a girl from the village, Maud Pell, who could hold her breath longer than any boy, dived where the current turned and came up with the cross in her arms, every scroll packed with black silt, not one arm bent.

Brannock asked her what she wanted for it. She said only that he hang it where the wind could get at the lines, so the rain could keep filling them. He did. Go and look at the ruin on a wet day and you will see water sitting in those carved channels, bright as a row of small mirrors. That is the cross keeping its own accounts, and I will leave you to count them.